The Chivilcoy OVNI Encounter

A Farmer at Dusk

On the evening of September 9, 1965, the Argentine farmer Juan Manuel Bordón was returning to his estancia outside Chivilcoy, a town some 160 kilometres west of Buenos Aires in the heart of the pampas. The hour was approaching twilight, the wind from the southwest, and the road empty. Bordón, aged forty-three at the time and respected within his community as a steady man not given to fantasies, would later testify that he became aware of an intense light to his left, paralleling the dirt road through a field of stubble. He stopped his vehicle. The light, he said, was emitted by a domed metallic object some six metres in diameter, resting on a tripod of articulated legs roughly fifty metres from the road.

What followed became one of the most fully documented Argentine close encounters of the 1960s. Bordón observed three figures, each approximately one and a half metres tall, moving on the ground beside the craft. They wore close-fitting silver suits and what appeared to be transparent helmets. He watched, by his account, for between four and seven minutes before the figures climbed a folding ramp into the underside of the craft. The object lifted vertically, hovered briefly, and departed at speed toward the south-southeast, leaving a circle of disturbed soil and a faint chemical smell that Bordón compared to “burnt sugar.”

The Air Force Investigation

Bordón reported the encounter to the local police the same night. The case was referred within forty-eight hours to the Comando de Regiones Aéreas of the Argentine Air Force, which dispatched a small investigative team led by Captain Omar R. Pagani. Pagani’s team conducted on-site measurements of the soil, photographed and cast the tripod impressions, interviewed Bordón at length, and canvassed neighbouring farms for corroborating witnesses. Three additional witnesses were located: two adolescent labourers from a farm two kilometres east, who had observed “a strange light low to the ground” at approximately the time of Bordón’s encounter, and a railway watchman who reported a brief radio interference around the same minute.

The site samples, sent to the Air Force’s chemical laboratory in El Palomar, returned anomalous readings of unspecified composition; the report noted residual ferric content above expected background levels but offered no firm interpretation. The tripod impressions, three depressions in a triangular pattern with sides of approximately two metres, were photographed but were not preserved due to the next week’s rains. Pagani’s final report, submitted in November 1965, described the case as “no apto para una explicación convencional” — unsuited to a conventional explanation — and recommended further study.

A Foundational Argentine Case

The Chivilcoy incident, often cited in the literature simply as “el caso Bordón,” entered Argentine UFO history as a foundational case alongside the better-known Trancas events of 1963. The Buenos Aires journalist Antonio Las Heras, whose 1976 book OVNIs: Las pruebas drew on Pagani’s documentation, presented the case as an early example of “humanoid encounter with material trace evidence.” The Argentine investigative organisation CEFAI, founded in part by Pagani after his retirement, treated Chivilcoy as one of its key reference cases through the 1970s and 1980s.

Bordón himself remained reticent about the encounter for the rest of his life. He gave one extended newspaper interview, to La Nación in 1968, and otherwise declined to speak publicly. Family members interviewed after his death in 1992 reported that he had been deeply unsettled by the experience and had remarked privately that the figures had seemed to communicate among themselves “without speaking aloud” — a detail not included in his original police statement. Whether this constituted a genuine impression of telepathic communication, a retrospective elaboration, or a misinterpretation of the helmets is impossible to determine.

Skeptical and Alternative Accounts

The Argentine skeptic Heriberto Janosch, writing in the 1990s, examined the Chivilcoy file in detail and offered a series of alternative explanations: that Bordón had encountered a meteorological balloon equipped with a payload that landed temporarily in the field; that the figures were field workers from a neighbouring farm misperceived in low light; that the chemical residues reflected agricultural fertiliser rather than anomalous trace material. Janosch’s analysis was thorough but did not definitively resolve the case, and he himself acknowledged that the tripod impressions, the convergence of independent witnesses, and the radio interference report were not easily accounted for in his alternative reconstruction.

A separate strand of analysis, advanced by the Argentine researcher Roberto Banchs, has placed Chivilcoy within the broader 1965 South American UFO wave that produced sightings across Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and Chile. Banchs catalogued more than two hundred reports across the region during a six-week window in August and September 1965, of which Chivilcoy and the Trancas Yacimiento de Las Yutas case were among the best-documented ground-trace incidents. The wave coincided with similar global activity, including the Exeter incident in New Hampshire that month, and contributed to the period during which UFOs first attracted sustained Argentine military attention.

The Site Today

The estancia where Bordón made his encounter remains in private hands and is not marked. Chivilcoy itself, a quiet agricultural town, has not embraced the case as a tourist draw in the manner of Capilla del Monte and the Cerro Uritorco encounters of the 1980s. The original Air Force file, declassified in part in 2019 as Argentina’s defence ministry began releasing UAP-related material, is housed in the historical archives of the Aeronáutica Argentina at El Palomar. The full file, including the laboratory report on the soil samples, runs to roughly 180 pages.

For Argentine ufology, the case retains significance as a moment when state, civilian, and witness testimony converged on an event that none of the parties involved was inclined to dramatise. Bordón died convinced that he had seen something for which he had no explanation. The Argentine Air Force’s record, as it stands, does not contradict him.

Sources

• Pagani, O. R. Informe sobre el caso Bordón, Comando de Regiones Aéreas, November 1965.
• Las Heras, A. OVNIs: Las pruebas. Buenos Aires: Plus Ultra, 1976.
• Banchs, R. Investigaciones OVNI en Argentina. Buenos Aires: Tres Tiempos, 1991.
• Janosch, H. El enigma OVNI. Buenos Aires: CIPE, 1996.